Good Samaritan Society - St Johns

This nursing home received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its excellent health inspections in recent years. We gave them an A- in this category. Arguably the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few relatively minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

This nursing home also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received an B. Our nursing score is largely associated with a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility Nebraska in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of moving patients even once per day.

The third category we looked at was short-term care, where this facility received a C in this category. In determining our short-term care grades, we analyze the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This rating is frequently a useful assessment of the nursing home's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we considered in this area is the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 4.5 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Our last area is long-term care, in which we awarded this nursing home a grade of C in this category. Our long-term care grade is commonly used to gauge a facility's performance as a traditional convalescent home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services provided by a rehabilitation facility. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Frankly, we were a bit concerned this facility provided the vaccine to only 90.44118 percent of its residents. Fortunately, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.